BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Order Forcing Trump to Rehire 16,000 Bureaucrats

The Supreme Court stayed a lower court judge's order forcing the Trump administration to reinstate more than 16,000 probationary federal employees.

The Supreme Court move will keep the employees off the payroll while lower courts resolve the underlying question of the firings' legality.

In the case, the American Federation of Government Employees—the largest public sector union in the federal government—sued the Office of Personnel Management over a memo informing other federal agencies that they can fire probationary employees. AFGE, a member of the AFL-CIO, has filed many lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies. The union and other plaintiffs claimed that the Office of Personnel Management had violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Judge William Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a preliminary injunction on March 13 directing the re-hiring of federal bureaucrats. The injunction required the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs to rehire employees.

The Supreme Court ruled that the injunction "was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case" and that those allegations "are presently insufficient to support the organization's standing."

"Standing" refers to a party's ability to bring a lawsuit. A party must demonstrate a sufficient connection to and harm from an action or law in order to challenge that action or law in court.

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, ruled in a similar case in February that AFGE and other unions "cannot manufacture standing through self-inflicted harms."

“Standing requires the plaintiffs to be more than ‘mere bystander[s]’ and instead requires a ‘personal stake in the dispute,’” he wrote, citing a 2024 Supreme Court case. “Further, the Supreme Court recently held that an organization that is not directly affected by an agency’s actions cannot establish standing simply by ‘divert[ing] its resources in response to a defendant’s actions.”

Two Democrat-appointed justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, would have denied the government's application for a stay.

The Supreme Court's order does not explicitly involve federal employees in another case. A federal judge in Maryland earlier this month issued a preliminary injunction reinstating some of the employees not covered in the Office of Personnel Management v. AFGE case.

The move comes amid a slew of judges issuing nationwide injunctions purporting to tie the president's hands on a wide range of issues.